Firefox - More fire and fewer cancer warnings than California

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Firefox - More fire and fewer cancer warnings than California

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Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

The Milkman posted:

If you're having responsiveness issues, you can always try disabling writing the cache to disk in favor of RAM. In my experience it alleviates nearly all the stuttering and lagging.

http://lifehacker.com/5687850/speed-up-firefox-by-moving-your-cache-to-ram-no-ram-disk-required

The drawbacks are linked in the post; slower plugin loading maybe, less cache, and a year ago they said caching will be smarted to use the disk less though I have no idea if anything's come of it. I just know if Firefox is slowing down on a computer and compacting the databases doesn't fix it, this usually does.

That really shouldn't do anything on Firefox 4 and later, as they say, and having a persistent disk cache does really help page load times. If you're having trouble with poor performance in Firefox due to disk I/O, I think a better solution would be to make sure the disk is healthy with Crystal Disk Info, run CCleaner to clean up all the kruft, then defrag the drive with MyDefrag. That will speed up your entire computer, not just Firefox.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2011 00:07

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 11:07

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

xamphear posted:

Is it okay to be disappointed in Firefox in this thread or will it get me called a troll? I've become increasingly dissatisfied with Firefox over the course of 2011 and have started moving people I know in the direction of Chrome. I only stick with Firefox due to the addons that I can't live without that aren't possible in Chrome (namely tree style tabs).

It's not trolling if you have reasonable concerns and can discuss them like an adult. If you complain that Firefox sucks at a thing that it is in fact very good at compared to other browsers, people are going to jump on you for being wrong. If you complain that Firefox sucks because of something caused by a modification you installed, then yeah people are going to think you're complaining unreasonably. In fact, if your post contains "Firefox sucks because..." in general terms you're pretty much just whining, as opposed to a post like "I have X problem with Firefox why does this happen and how can I fix it?" There's a lot of people blaming Mozilla when they're running old-rear end drivers with outdated plug-ins and a profile they've been migrating between versions for a year, and that's just not reasonable or constructive.

SNOT CORN posted:

Chrome might eat the same amount of ram as firefox but at least it doesn't poo poo itself every other time I try to watch a flash video. I know this has probably already been discussed to death but constantly locking up and crashing pretty much makes firefox worse than even IE these days.

You probably need to update your video drivers, update Flash player, or make a new Firefox profile. I don't have stability problems and I spend a lot of time watching videos on a number of sites. Make sure you don't have any crappy plug-ins (ESPECIALLY non-Microsoft antivirus programs) as these will break the browser. You could always disable hardware acceleration in Flash display options, but you shouldn't have to.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2011 09:10

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

xamphear posted:

stuff

So I see two issues. To tackle the second first, you're not aware of the changes and features that are coming with each new version and those that are in store, so you have the perception that nothing cool is happening. Wikipedia summarizes the release notes for recent Firefox versions, the highlight of 9 was Type Inference which significantly improved JavaScript performance. Memory improvements also didn't just happen in 7, those were just the most dramatic. Each release is more efficient with memory thanks to the benefits of the Memshrink project. Planet Mozilla is a blog with a bunch of posts tangentially related to Mozilla, you'll regularly see announcements and discussions of new features here. On a lower level, The Burning Edge tracks significant changes that have landed on the Nightly tree on a weekly/semi-weekly basis, every 6 weeks these changes get rolled into Aurora and trickle down to release. There's also the Firefox Release Tracking page on MozillaWiki, which details the upcoming versions and what significant features are contained.

As for why people should use Firefox, no all reasons apply to everyone. I like the extensions and add-on support that isn't replicated in other browsers. As we've established, Firefox scales better when you have more tabs open. They're working on a new JavaScript engine that may put them at the top of the heap for JS performance (and thus site responsiveness) once again. I see the consistent, reliable release schedule as a plus. Chrome has some weird bugs and behaviors (see: the add-ons to make it work on SA), Firefox is going to "just work" when it comes to page rendering and functionality. Some people are ideological and like that Firefox is Free software and that Mozilla is a non-profit.

As for your responsiveness issues, I don't see similar behavior. I'm on a Core 2 Quad with a Radeon HD 4850 512MB on Catalyst 11.12, Windows 7 64-bit, 8GB of RAM, and a 150GB Velociraptor. I'm using Aurora 11, but my experience has been pretty consistent since Aurora 9. From a look at about :crashes, I'm seeing a crash about once a month. The only time I see Firefox be downright unresponsive is when I have it reload my last session and it has to pull up a bunch of tabs, which pretty much freezes the browser until they load. That sucks, and I wish it didn't do that, but since that's something I hit so rarely it doesn't really affect my daily usage. I just tested and I don't have any issues with Firefox showing solid white after unlocking, this could be fixed since the version you're using, or there be something else different between our configurations.

As to how you might be able to fix your problem, I'd start by looking into the video drivers. I know Steam says they're up to date, but I'd make sure you're running Catalyst 11.12 and the latest Catalyst Application Profiles package. If you are, try uninstalling it, running Driver Sweeper to remove the remnants, then reinstalling them. This will clear all of the registry settings related to the drivers, which can fix odd bugs, including your issues with Flash. If you have any non-Microsoft antivirus/firewall/Internet security programs on the machine, uninstall them completely. Regarding the latency when opening the download window, my initial suspicion would be that you're downloading to a secondary harddrive that has spun down, causing the app to have to hang until the drive spins up and lets it create its temporary files. That or SOMETHING that's causing Firefox's disk I/Os to get stuck. Make sure you've used CCleaner to compact your database files.

Finally, I know it's inconvenient, but you might find it helpful to back up your profile, completely uninstall Firefox and delete your profile, then reinstall Firefox (or maybe Aurora if you want to see more changes) and see if you can reproduce any problems on a default profile. You can reimport profile data like your bookmarks and cookies, and reinstall the extensions you most need and are least likely to break things until you see changes. Of course, if the problems are random that makes it much harder to diagnose, but them's the breaks.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2011 13:46

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

ryanbruce posted:

When resuming my laptop from suspend, Firefox greys out and doesn't respond for what feels like forever. It varies between a minute or two all the way up to 5-10 minutes. I don't recall if there's a correlation between number of open tabs -vs- load times because I haven't made an effort to check. If I launch TaskMan I can watch Firefox slowly ramp up its RAM usage and once it stops growing, Firefox starts to work.

My guess is that you're waiting while Firefox gets paged back into memory from disk, a few minutes does seem unreasonable though. I'd check the hard disk with Crystal Disk Info to verify that it doesn't show Caution, disable the pagefile, run CCleaner to clean up the disk and compact the database files, run the MyDefrag System Disk Weekly script to fully defragment the drive, then reenable the page file (so it's created in a contiguous block) and see if you see a difference.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2011 22:46

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

ICA posted:

Is there any way I can set up more than 1 'profile' (for want of a better word) on Firefox? I'd like one profile for normal browsing and another for jerkin'. I realize there's mode set aside specifically for that but Private Browsing doesn't save passwords.

You sure can, here's instructions from Mozilla. Basically, you add -P to the shortcut and it will pop up the Profile Manager every time you launch and ask you what profile you want to use.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2011 00:15

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

For those that didn't like the change to a dark background behind images, there is now an "Old Default Image Style" extension that will change the alignment and background color to whatever you choose.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2012 06:46

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Rekkit posted:

Can anyone explain to me why this happens?

I've noticed it started happening after I updated Firefox. Basically, any menus that extend past the main window and onto the desktop or taskbar will remain there. Can anyone tell me why this happens, how to make it go away, or even if it's the browser's fault or something else?

I see Aero also isn't working, is there something wrong with your video drivers? I'd update to the latest drivers from the video adapter manufacturer, turn on Aero (right-click on desktop, Personalize, set theme to an Aero theme of your choice), and see if you still have problems.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2012 18:46

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

The first Firefox Extended Support Release, based on Firefox 10, is now available. This is for businesses that don't want frequent Firefox major version updates.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2012 05:24

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Dice Dice Baby posted:

Are you using extensions? I find the updates annoying for that reason, mostly

If that's the case, look for an extension called "Add-on Compatibility Reporter"

They actually fixed that, extensions now default to compatible with new versions unless something actually changed to break them. The ACR extension just reports stats now, since there's no need to change compatibility settings.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2012 14:42

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:

I just did this and not only did video start working well, Firefox 10 started working faster as well. What the gently caress?

You probably have old/bad video drivers. Firefox uses GPU acceleration for compositing and layers (unlike other browsers that use the CPU), in addition to Flash using it for video decoding and display. Try updating to the latest drivers provided by your graphics manufacturer.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2012 00:57

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

ryanbruce posted:

Is this only true for later gen cards? I'm running a 7950GT in my daily driver with the latest drivers from Nvidia (and dealing with a world of issues that I won't get into here)

I'm pretty sure they can still do hardware accelerated compositing of Layers using Direct3D/OpenGL (depending on platform) on older hardware assuming the driver isn't blocklisted. Hardware accelerated Direct2D rendering (where most of the performance and image quality gains come from) requires Vista SP2 or later and I THINK a DX9.0C videocard, but I'm not precisely sure where the cutoff is. I know it's blocked on some lower-end products (especially older Intel integrated graphics) that are capable of supporting it because the hardware is so crappy it's faster to just do it in software.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2012 01:16

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Dice Dice Baby posted:

Could you list your hardware and operating system?

I'd like more information on this flash HW acceleration doowacky? Is it in any way related to DXVA?

Yes, the flash Hardware Acceleration checkbox enables both DXVA for video decoding and also hardware accelerated rendering of the decoded video and controls. It shouldn't interfere with anything else or cause problems, and it works fine on my system, but I've seen other people have issues.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2012 03:09

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

There was a cluster of performance-related blog posts today on Planet Mozilla:

The Memshrink Project Week 34 Progress Notes are now available. The first major item is that part of Mozilla's review process before approving add-ons is now a check for zombie compartments, a kind of memory leak. They are finding and reporting leaks to authors, so this bodes well for a future where add-ons are less leaky. The second item is that stats are showing an increase in memory usage for Firefox 12, which is now on Aurora. The cause is a patch from early January, they are working to isolate and fix the issue.

Nicholas Nethercote also has a blog post about the benefits of reducing memory consumption.

Brian Bondy has a blog post about the Snappy Project's work to reduce Firefox startup time.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2012 07:36

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Those seems like odd criticisms, given that there is a new tab page in Firefox 12 (off by default until 13), I just posted links to their efforts to improve performance, and the import wizard supports everything but Chrome, with Chrome support in Firefox 11. The Firefox Feature page on the Mozilla Wiki shows a list of the features that are in progress and have been shipped in recent versions.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2012 08:59

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

I don't really think you're being fair regarding Firefox performance. All browsers have improved in performance, including Firefox. If you look at the AreWeFastYet graphs from two years ago, you can see how far Firefox has come (to the point where it's consistently beating V8 across the board). You're right that there's more to performance than just how fast JavaScript executes, but that's what the Snappy project is working on, making the browser "feel snappy." Some of the more important improvements related to Garbage Collection will probably land in Firefox 13. Add-ons also make a huge difference in how fast Firefox runs and feels, if you've got lots of add-ons (especially complicated ones like Firebug) or have been using the same profile for years you should probably look into making a change.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2012 10:32

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

ryanbruce posted:

If I click the little "power" button in Firebug when I'm not using it, is that good enough?

I believe you have to disable the add-on through the Add-Ons Manager to remove its impact completely, though turning it off probably helps.

quote:

Do you have suggestions for making a profile swap less painful?

Unfortunately I love the Awesome Bar too much to nuke my history, but I could easily transfer bookmarks/passwords. I ask because I'm pretty sure this profile is about 900 years old.

Make a new profile and then copy over the .sqlite database files you want to keep from the old one, places.sqlite holds your bookmarks and history and such. There are cases where you'd get performance gains from creating the SQLite files from scratch, but running CCleaner and letting it compact your database files will help too. While you're at it I'd also recommend using MyDefrag, fragmentation can really affect Firefox responsiveness during use and the System Disk Weekly script does a great job of optimizing your disk. If you have a huge drive with lots of stuff on it then running the System Disk Daily script will finish a lot faster, it skips moving large files.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2012 11:13

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

PUNCHITCHEWIE posted:

Just AdBlock and Firebug, disabled both and this didn't fix it. I don't know how to make a new profile and frankly I'm done spending time on this issue, but thanks anyway.

Here's how to manage profiles in Firefox. Make a new profile, and if that fixes the problem, you can copy over the profile data you want using the instructions at the link in the bottom of the page.

:siren:

Mod Note: I'm really not happy with the shitposting we tend to see around every major Firefox update. If you have an issue, make a constructive post, something like "I am having x problem with Firefox, anyone know what I could do about that?" and not "Firefox sucks because of this problem I am having that is not caused by Firefox." I know it's frustrating when something doesn't seem to work right but chill out and then post about it.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2012 02:11

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Selavi posted:

I don't know, but it always seems to take at least a minute or two. It's especially annoying because I often put my computer in hibernate, and if I close Firefox before doing that, it will still be ending the process when I start my computer back up. Or if I have to restart Firefox for whatever reason. I do usually leave Firefox running for a while so that might be why I'm noticing this in my case. But why is this an issue with Firefox and not with other browsers?

Firefox suffers more than other browsers from anything that impacts the speed at which it can access the disk, because it has more stuff to do when it closes and a lot of I/O happens on the main thread. They're working on fixing this in Firefox 13. Firefox also performs updates when you close the browser, which can take a few seconds. It definitely shouldn't take more than 10-20 seconds though, here's my general advice in these cases:

1. Run Crystal Disk Info, if a drive shows Caution or Bad that means it is failing and you should back up your stuff and replace the drive ASAP.

2. Run CCleaner to clean up junk files and compact your Firefox databases. On the Applications tab, under Firefox, make sure at least Internet Cache and Compact Databases are checked. Close all browsers before running the cleaner!

3. Run MyDefrag and use the System Disk Daily script to defragment your system drive. It's pretty fast and very effective at speeding up disk performance.

4. If If you still see slow startup/shutdown performance, make a new Firefox profile, go to Firefox, Add-Ons, Plugins, disable any plugins you aren't sure you want. Plugins from Antivirus vendors MURDER Firefox so make sure you don't have any. Since this is a clean profile there shouldn't be anything on the Extensions tab but check anyway and disable anything there.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2012 19:56

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

In an interesting blog post from Nicholas Nethercote, the Memshrink guy, it was revealed that the McAfee Side Advisor add-on leaks most of the memory the browser allocates, easily resulting in memory usage over 1GB. This underscores the impact of third-party antivirus programs on system performance and reliability in general, and the impact of even popular add-ons on Firefox performance in particular.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2012 06:13

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Left Ventricle posted:

I have had issues with Hotmail and Firefox for a couple years now. It just won't load for me. I have to use Internet Explorer for that. Firefox also won't load interactive maps, like Google and Bing. It's probably some obscure setting I inadvertently/unknowingly modified a while ago.

You might try updating your video drivers, that could improve things. If that doesn't help then as usual trying a new profile is a good idea.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2012 08:57

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Lum posted:

Fortunately I noticed this, but that particular file is a custom ROM I'm about to flash onto my bloody phone. Why can't it tell me the download got cut short?

I've only seen this happen when the server doesn't tell Firefox the total file size so Firefox has no way of knowing if the download is complete or not.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2012 00:30

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

AlmightyBob posted:

Did the latest update remove the ability to add security exceptions for sites with expired certs? wtf?

EDIT: The exception button finally came up but wasn't working until I went to the :permissions for the site and clicked Forget About This Site.

Wow that is pretty lovely, I'm complaining about in the Mozilla IRC now and I'll see if there's a bug filed. Full steps to fix:

1. Go to about :permissions.
2. Click on the site name on the left side.
3. Click the "Forget about this site" button in the upper right.
4. Wait for Firefox to clear your data, then restart the browser (restart may not be necessary).
5. Visit the site again, click "I Understand the Risks", then Confirm Security Exception.

You'll have to log back into whatever site it was since your cookies will be cleared.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2012 19:38

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

AlmightyBob posted:

Did the latest update remove the ability to add security exceptions for sites with expired certs? wtf?

EDIT: The exception button finally came up but wasn't working until I went to the :permissions for the site and clicked Forget About This Site.

I talked to the Firefox folks, this is working as intended for sites that use HTTP Strict Transport Security, which lets a site require a secure connection. If the site has STS set, the browser isn't allowed to store a security exception. Apparently forgetting about the site using about :permissions clears the STS flag, and it can't get a new one because it won't connect to the site due to the invalid certificate. Once you save an exception, STS isn't an issue since the browser will happily connect securely. Bottom line: If a site is gonna use STS, it needs to be drat sure their certs never become invalid.

VerySolidSnake posted:

Firefox 10 for me is always using way to many system resources. I go from opening 4 tabs, to 20, to 30, but it stays at 600mb of usage and 10% of CPU when I go back to 5. I can restart Firefox to start fresh again with resources, but this is extremely annoying.

This is usually due to third-party add-ons or extensions, especially those installed by AV programs. Make sure you don't have any non-Microsoft Antivirus/Firewall/Internet Security programs installed; if you do, completely uninstall them and switch to Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free, provides excellent protection, and won't slow down your computer or cause system problems. Also, go to Firefox, Add-ons, and disable anything you don't use on the Extensions and Plugins tabs. If that still doesn't fix it, follow the instructions in the OP to make a new profile.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2012 21:05

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

VerySolidSnake posted:

I'm currently trying out using a new user profile, memory and CPU so far is actually much better. However if I continue to use this new user profile for the next several months with it start slowing down again?

Note that disabling an add-on or extension won't necessarily be able to fix the damage it caused, which is why making a new profile is suggested. The behavior you saw certainly shouldn't happen, it's not related to how long Firefox has been running with the same profile, but something that was done to Firefox by a program or add-on that was installed.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2012 05:26

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Another edition of the Burning Edge is out, spanning 2/17-2/26. This lists the most significant changes that have happened on the trunk (development tree) since the last update. Most notably, Incremental Garbage Collection has landed, which improves the responsiveness of the browser and the fluidity of animations and applets. Another important feature is that Address Space Layout Randomization is now mandatory for add-ons, which will make it more difficult to infect your system with malware via buffer overflow exploits of plug-ins you have installed. The downside is that add-ons that don't support this and aren't updated prior to release will stop working, but the major ones should be updated. This only affects add-ons that ship executable code, such as .dll files. Both of these features will be available in Firefox 13.

Interestingly, some of the worst offenders on the ASLR issue are plug-ins from antivirus programs, which is another reason why you should never use non-Microsoft antivirus programs (use Microsoft Security Essentials instead).

# ¿ Feb 27, 2012 17:16

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Golbez posted:

So, on a modern PC, would we really gain any performance by streamlining these pages? Or is it simply a matter of making it more maintainable in general, getting away from the horror of nested tables?

Page design absolutely makes a huge difference in load time, memory usage, and other performance factors. I'm no web developer or anything, but basically the browser will progressively render content as it downloads/parses it, but it's possible (and probably likely) that later content will affect the rendering of earlier content, requiring the browser to do what's called a "reflow" and re-render the page. Hypothetically, if a page has to reflow four times at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% (obviously pretty contrived), you're looking at a total render time of ~250%. It's easy to say that the base render time should be very small on a modern PC, but that is stacking with an AV program that slows page load by 2-4X, maybe the user has IE, and maybe they're actually on a netbook, cellphone, or other device with a slow processor. Add in some slight packet loss or latency due to a wireless or mobile connection and you have a recipe for painfully slow page loads.

Google has done a lot of public work on improving web performance. You might find the following links useful:

Google PageSpeed family of tools
Web Performance Best Practices
Let's Make The Web Faster
LMTWF Tools page, including Google and third-party tools

# ¿ Mar 16, 2012 02:14

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

arioch posted:

I haven't actually had this happen until I started using the post-10 nightlies, which is why I dropped back to 8-ish, but now that we're on 11, it's ... yeah. Very annoying. Since it ONLY happens on SA I was already sure it's pretty much a SA specific issue, though, but not having the back event is painful.

For what it's worth I haven't seen this on the Aurora channel except when I try to use expired links (eg, middle-clicking a "go to last read post" link from the user CP, then doing it again before new posts have happened). I do have NoAds and use AdblockPlus to block the Quantserve, Indieclick, and Google Analytics scripts on SA.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2012 20:01

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Flipperwaldt posted:

Here I was, totally impressed with Firefox' completely silent update process during the last year. Turns out, that was because it didn't update at all, despite the settings!

I'm thinking you have some sort of permissions issue. What version of Windows are you using, and do you have Firefox installed somewhere non-standard?

# ¿ Mar 17, 2012 20:51

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Mozilla has decided to add H.264 support for Firefox, abandoning their previous position of only supporting Free codecs. I'd say this is a good thing, because WebM is a huge pile of poo poo and H.264 is vastly superior, and it has hardware acceleration support.

Here's Mitchell bakers blog post on the topic
Here's Brendan Eich's blog post
Here's a lovely image macro of Mozilla's previous position on the issue

# ¿ Mar 21, 2012 05:45

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

pseudorandom name posted:

Technically, they're not adding H.264 to Firefox, they're adding the ability to use the OS supplied H.264 decoder. If your OS (i.e. Windows XP) doesn't come with one, you're out of luck.

Keep in mind that any most non-ancient computers have hardware H.264 decoding via DXVA, so a software decoder doesn't need to be installed.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2012 06:29

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

The Snappy group has started publishing meeting minutes, it's pretty interesting to see all the different projects they're working on to make Firefox faster.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2012 18:51

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Plug-in "click to play" (click-to-activate) is now available in Nightly builds. This keeps all plug-ins deactivated until a user clicks on a plug-in object, at which point all plug-ins are activated for that page. They hope to have this feature and the ability to remember settings on a per-site basis available for Firefox 14, but it may not be ready in time.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2012 06:27

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

GUI posted:

I've been wanting to get rid of some Firefox extensions for a while, but for some reason whenever I go to the addons menu the extensions part of it is completely blank despite themes/plugins showing up fine. Is there something obvious I'm missing? The extensions themselves are working fine, they just aren't showing up in the addons menu for some reason. I tried restarting Firefox in safe mode but got the same result.

Are you launching Firefox as admin? If that doesn't help, this may be one of the few things that uninstalling and reinstalling can fix (make sure not to delete your data when prompted), if that doesn't do it either, try a new profile.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2012 21:49

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Kyle Huey has a neat blog post up about the memory leak cleanup functionality coming in Firefox 15. In short, data related to the sites you have open (such as compiled JavaScript) is held in "compartments." These compartments are deleted from memory when the browser is done with them (should be when the page is closed), but sometimes bugs in add-ons (or, less commonly, the browser) mean that the compartment is still being referenced, so it can't be removed and is leaked. This new functionality detects when the page is closed and breaks all references to its compartment, allowing it to be deleted regardless of what buggy add-ons or code are still referencing it. The upside is that this reduces memory leaked during their tests by 80%, the downside is that buggy code that would have previously caused a leak may now throw an exception, which could break some things. They have about 18 weeks until this hits the release channel though (6 each in Nightly, Aurora, Beta), which should be enough time for add-on authors to find and fix breakage.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 16:56

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Obviously this isn't scientific at all, but Firefox 14 feels much faster to use, really can notice the improved latency, especially with I/O transactions not blocking things.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2012 18:47

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

DrBouvenstein posted:

Does anyone else experience a slew of problems with the Gizmodo/Lifehacker/Gawker et al series of blogs?

Are you using some lovely non-Microsoft antivirus/firewall/Internet security program? If so, uninstall it completely and try again. If not, try updating your network adapter drivers. If you have the same problem on other computers on your network, try updating your router firmware and resetting it to factory defaults.

# ¿ May 8, 2012 00:30

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Firefox now has a "Reset Firefox" button that builds a new profile and then reimports your data, fixing Firefox problems without a laborious troubleshooting process. You can access it by going to Firefox, Help, Troubleshooting Information, then clicking the "Reset Firefox" button in the upper right.

# ¿ May 15, 2012 03:33

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Wladimir Palant, Adblock Plus author, has posted a new experimental extension called "Suspend Background Tabs". It's being jokingly called "Lagblock Plus". The goal is to reduce/eliminate CPU usage by unfocused tabs, improving responsiveness and reducing jerkiness (jank) in the active tab. This is a prototype of technology coming to Firefox in a future version. It has some workarounds to let Youtube videos and such keep playing when you move to a different tab, but if you have problems you can pin your tab as an app tab, then check the "Don't suspend pinned app tabs" option in the Add-On options.

# ¿ May 18, 2012 16:48

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Tivac posted:

Anybody else finding Aurora to suck up a ton of RAM lately? I'm hovering at almost 1Gb with 5 tabs open, one of which is just about :memory. FF isn't able to clean up after something because "Minimize memory usage" isn't bringing it down at all.

Nope, it's running normally here. It's probably one of your add-ons.

quote:

about :compartments shows a truly disturbing number of ghost windows which I assume is the culprit. Are any popular add-ons known to leak horribly?

Yes, many add-ons cause pretty terrible performance impacts. This should be fixed in Firefox 15, where add-ons are no longer allowed to leak memory, at the cost of breaking some functionality. Nothing that can't be worked-around by add-on authors, but these are the same authors who wouldn't fix their memory leaks, so... The hope is that very few add-ons were depending on the now-broken behavior, most of them caused it accidentally.

# ¿ May 31, 2012 01:23

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 11:07

Alereon: Feb 6, 2004; Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed; College Slice

Tivac posted:

Any of these known troublemakers?

code:

Application: Firefox 14.0a2 (20120531042008)
Operating System: WINNT (x86-msvc)

- Bookmark Favicon Changer 1.62
- Download Statusbar 0.9.10
- Extension List Dumper 1.15.2
- Firebug 1.10.0a9
- FireFontFamily 0.1.2
- HTTPS-Everywhere 2.0.5
- JSONovich 1.9.4
- Test Pilot 1.2.1
- FiddlerHook 2.3.9.1 (Disabled)
- Quick Locale Switcher 1.7.8 (Disabled)
- Snap Links Plus 2.2.1 (Disabled)
- SomethingAwful Last Read Enhancement 1.99.120310 (Disabled)

Firebug certainly, not sure about the rest. I wouldn't worry too much about it since this is all moot on Monday when Firefox 15 hits Aurora.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2012 01:54

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Firefox - More fire and fewer cancer warnings than California

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